The top-quark pair production cross section at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic order

Understand

We present predictions for the total ttbar production cross section sigma_ttbar at the Tevatron and LHC, which include the resummation of soft logarithms and Coulomb singularities through next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic order, and ttbar bound-state contributions.

• Resummation effects amount to about 8 % of the next-to-leading order result at Tevatron and about 3 % at LHC with 7 TeV centre-of-mass energy.
• They lead to a significant reduction of the theoretical uncertainty.
• With m_t=173.3 GeV, we find sigma_ttbar=7.22^{+0.31+0.71}_{-0.47-0.55} pb at Tevatron and sigma_ttbar=162.6^{+7.4+15.4}_{-7.5-14.7} at the LHC, in good agreement with the latest experimental measurements.